The Floods Took Her Friend – Now She’s Taking On Big Oil: Meet The Climate Activist Fighting for Uganda’s Future

On a perfect spring morning in London, suited executives shuffled into HSBC’s plush Canary Wharf headquarters. Security was tight, hospitality trays circulated. The annual general meeting (AGM) was proceeding smoothly – until a 27-year-old Ugandan woman tried to speak.

Patience Nabukalu had travelled nearly 6,500 kilometres from Kampala to deliver a letter. In it, she pleaded with Georges Elhedery, HSBC’s CEO, to stop financing fossil fuel giants and destructive industrial projects. She had registered via shareholder proxy, pre-submitted her question and followed protocol. Yet when the meeting began, she and a fellow activist from the Philippines were passed over – despite being first in line.

Only after the room erupted in boos were they begrudgingly given five minutes. Her question – “Has HSBC measured the damage they have done by financing corporations that are driving the climate crisis?” – went unanswered. “He didn’t even take my letter,” she tells me. “I left it with a guard. I doubt it ever reached him. What happened was very cruel and a clear sign leaders like him aren’t prioritising our communities or everyday people.” This, she says, is the reality of being a climate activist from the Global South.

Patience’s journey began not in a boardroom, but in the flood-ridden, rubbish-strewn streets of Nateete – a rapidly urbanising Kampala suburb once rich in wetlands. She was nine when her best friend, Kevin, was swept away in a stormwater trench.

She rushes through the story in scant terms: “We used to drain the floodwater with buckets. That day, the water came too fast. Kevin slipped. We couldn’t save him.” Most would repress such tragedy. For Nabukalu, it sparked purpose. She continues: “My house would flood. Rubbish and plastic poured in. I’d clear it myself. Growing up, I couldn’t go to school because roads were flooded. They sabotaged my education. [For us, picking up rubbish] wasn’t activism [as it is for some people living in the West,] it was communal support so we could live.”

She went on to study geography at A-level, determined to make sense of the environmental shifts she saw all around her. There, she uncovered the deeper story: that Uganda’s climate chaos – flash floods followed by parching droughts – isn’t just bad luck. It’s the fallout of Western excess. While her own community contributes little to global emissions, it bears the brunt of the consequences of overconsumption, fossil fuel dependence and the insatiable global demand for raw materials.

University was out of reach – her mother’s earnings couldn’t stretch that far – but during the pandemic, Patience found her voice in digital forums and on social media, connecting with Global South activists whose stories rarely make the headlines.

“I didn’t want to lose another friend. I had to speak out,” she says. Unable to take the academic route, she channelled her passion into grassroots organising, helping to launch Fridays for Future Uganda in 2019 – the homegrown echo of Greta Thunberg’s school strikes. By 2020, she was co-leading campaigns against wetland degradation and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and soon rose to prominence within MAPA (Most Affected People and Areas), representing Uganda at COP26 and orchestrating high-profile protests.

Now a leading organiser for Fridays for Future Uganda, Patience is one of the strongest voices opposing the $5 billion, 1,443‑km (896-mile) EACOP. She warns that, according to Stop EACOP, the project – set to begin exports between July 2026 and 2027 – will emit an estimated 34 million tonnes of harmful CO₂ annually and displace communities with little compensation. “It’s a climate bomb. And the oil isn’t for us – it’s for the Global North”, she says, “We take the risk; they take the profits.”

HSBC says it doesn’t directly fund EACOP, but Nabukalu points to its financial ties with TotalEnergies, one of the pipeline’s main backers, saying: “They fund TotalEnergies, and TotalEnergies is building the pipeline. It’s the same thing. I’ll keep pressuring the banks and insurers. I’m not giving up.”

More than 40 major banks – including JPMorgan, Chase and Barclays – have ruled out funding the pipeline amid climate and rights concerns, but HSBC has yet to follow suit. The bank’s silence comes as it slashes $1.5 billion in costs and pares back operations, raising questions about its priorities as pressure mounts on EACOP’s remaining financial backers.

According to ActionAid International, HSBC channelled over £62 billion into fossil fuel and industrial agribusiness ventures between 2016 and 2022 – activities linked to hunger, displacement and environmental destruction. The worst, the report reveals, of any bank in Europe. In February, the bank quietly delayed key climate targets by 20 years, while restructuring bonuses that could award Elhedery up to 600% of his salary.

What happened to Patience’s friend Kevin wasn’t a freak accident. Uganda is one of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries. Floods and landslides are now routine. In March, seven people, including three-year-old Otim Kisa Eliza and 11-month-old Ochaka Chon, were killed when floodwaters engulfed their home in the Mulimira area of Bukoto. In September 2022, 15 people died in a single landslide. Two months later, rains buried villages in Bulambuli District. Nearly 30 people died.

And, in April last year, Kenya’s Mathare River burst its banks. One woman, Melvine, fled barefoot through the floodwaters, holding her baby. Mathare’s informal settlements, near the proposed pipeline route, became death traps. It’s a glimpse of what’s ahead, says Nabukalu.

But hope doesn’t feel out of reach. Patience’s activism helped stir a clean-up of Lake Victoria – Africa’s largest lake, bordering Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya – once choked with waste, it is now slowly breathing again. And her community followed: “People are doing proper disposal to stop it being a danger zone. Communities are stepping up, doing more clean ups, reinforcing flood defences and carrying out sustainable farming to reduce landslide risks.”

Yet on the frontlines of climate justice, progress often comes at a price. In Uganda, activism carries risks. Last May, nine people were arrested for protesting against EACOP. The media is tightly controlled. When asked about the dangers, she says: “I can’t talk about that over the phone from Uganda. It’s best if you Google it.”

““It’s a climate bomb. The oil isn’t for us – it’s for the Global North. We take the risk; they take the profits”

The toll is visible. After COP29, Patience fell into a deep depression. The pain and exhaustion in her voice is almost too much to bear, as she says: “From then until March, I couldn’t function. We get red carpets and given space at forums like COP, but coming from the Global South, being a Black woman, we aren’t prioritised or appreciated. It’s so, so tough.”

Still, she continues the fight – because someone has to. “When I look at my community, at what they go through, I can’t give up,” she says, adding her people are facing a crisis they “didn’t create”, but the Global North “will feel the heat in time”.

What Patience demands is not sympathy, but action. People must “wake up” before “more lives, traditions and cultures” are lost. Some of EACOP’s oil will come from Tilenga fields, which sits in Uganda’s Murchison Falls National Park, home to 451 species of bird and 76 species of mammals, including elephants, buffalo, lions, leopards, chimpanzees and giraffes. Also at risk is Lake Albert itself – not to mention the 40 million people who depend on Lake Victoria, around which the EACOP pipeline is planned to run.

The UN agrees, with Secretary General António Guterres calling new fossil fuel investments “moral and economic madness”. He warns they’ll become stranded assets. Still, the drills turn.

Because while the UN can issue warnings, it can’t enforce them. It has no legal power to stop sovereign nations or corporations from greenlighting fossil fuel projects. What’s needed is binding international regulation, real political will and financial systems that stop rewarding destruction – not just statements, but consequences.

Patience speaks not just for Uganda, she says, but for the voiceless across the Global South. “People in the Global North enjoy their privileges because of their leaders’ exploitation. It harms us. They must hold their leaders accountable. They’re enjoying their privileges at the expense of our lives.”

As oil giants dig in their heels and banks delay action, the girl who once bailed flood water from her living room with a plastic bucket rises again – armed with nothing but conviction, and a voice too clear, too urgent, to be ignored.

HSBC has been approached for comment.